An interview with Alfredo Jaar, Chilean artist and intellectual that with his work tries to waken us and urge us to truly see, think, develop a well-thought out opinion

“I think that artists are thinkers, they’re intellectuals, and art is about thinking. For me, art is about 99% thinking and 1% making. So I spend most of my time thinking”.

I thought that the best way to start this article was opening it with a quotation that artist Alfredo Jaar, born in Chile in 1956, told me during the interview. I met and interviewed him at Arles where Jaar was presenting a solo exhibition in a former church called Église des Frères-Prêcheurs.

As well as being an artist and an intellectual generally speaking, Jaar is, for and foremost, an architect and, as such, he designed the exhibition in Arles in such a way as to allow his works to engage in a dialogue with one another against the space in which they were displayed. I must admit that seeing so many works by Jaar in the same place made me feel bewildered as, in order to be processed, each one of his works needs attention, time and pondering.

And this is exactly what Alfredo Jaar aims at: to waken us from a state of intellectual lethargy and urge us to truly see, think, develop a well-thought out opinion without taking everything the media inflict on us at face value.

Jaar, who currently lives in New York, has experienced life in Pinochet’s Chile on his own skin; he graduated in architecture during the dictatorship and started his artistic journey right when repression and censorship had peaked: all this left a permanent mark on Jaar as a human being and as an artist.

His art has a message and it is imbued with a strong political element: Jaar does not favour a specific medium to express himself; work after work, he simply employs the most suitable ones to convey his thoughts, from videos, images and light to multimedia installations.

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The recurring themes are the condemnation of injustice and of the atrocities, news manipulation by certain press and the supposed objective truth of photography.

Having said that, Jaar’s art is not just intellectual: there is a strong aesthetic element to his works that stirs up the senses and hits you in the stomach and this provides the foundation through which Jarr gets the viewer’s attention thereby prompting some cogitation and pondering also on a rational level.

Jaar is rightly persuaded that aestheticization is innate in the depiction process: there is no depiction without aesthetics, it is a “false debate” says Jaar quoting Jean Luc Godard; it may be true that sometimes we are called to choose between ethics and aesthetics but it is equally true that, regardless of what we pick between the two, the other will always be there waiting for us at the end of your journey.

What Jaar achieves exceptionally well is to strike the perfect balance among information, ethics and didactics with poetics and aesthetics. Upon observing Jaar’s works one could state that they manage to bring the focus on the “ugliness” in the world by way of an aesthetic act; it is as if through beauty one could reconstruct meaning, as if the wars, the injustice, false representation were a breakup from beauty and his works a way of fixing the laceration.

The first work that Jaar explains to me as part of his exhibition in Arles is entitled Searching for Africa in Life and dates back to 1996: all the 2500 covers of Life, from its launch in 1936 to the year the publication died-off in 1996 have been printed and laid out in a chronological order creating almost a mosaic. It is quite safe to say that Life has created photo journalism and yet, if one looks for images portraying Africa would realize that the continent is featured in only 5 covers (and through images of animals). Jaar does not say anything explicitly; he simply shows us the covers and offers a title: Searching for Africa in Life. Nothing else is needed.

I’d like now to move on to one of my favourite installations among the ones on display at Arles: a work dedicated to the Rwandan genocide (which the artist dedicated six years of his life to and 25 works, of which 4 are on display at the exhibition in Arles). What happened in Rwanda in 1994 is a story of connivance and atrocities: the third genocide of the 20th century, in chronological order, after the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Turks (1915-1916) which caused an estimated 1,300,000 deaths and the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people with over 6,000,000 being killed during World War II.

In 1994, in Rwanda, in the span of only 10 days over 1 million Rwandan Tutsis (of a total population of 8,000,000) were hacked to death by the Hutus with machetes and nail-spiked clubs while the rest of the world stood watching without stepping in and by simply calling the events as unmanageable tribal violence set against a cultural and social background deemed too different from ours.

In August 1994 Alfredo Jaar went to see what had happened with his own eyes; he talked to survivors, took a remarkable amount of photographs and recorded people’s voices. Real Pictures the work I saw in a corner in the Arles church was displayed the first time in January 1995 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, almost two years after Jaar had returned from Rwanda, this being the time necessary to “digest” and to find the most suitable way of showing the images he had shot.

Real Pictures is a cemetery of images: it is made of hundreds of boxes in black linen, laid one on top of the other to create several columns; inside each box is “buried” one of the images taken by Jaar in Rwanda: the massacre, the survivors, the devastation. Each of the boxes’ lid features a brief caption printed in white with the place, date and a detailed description of the photograph that is buried inside.

I believe that there is a high poetical value to Real Pictures and that the work provides food for thought in more than one way; it invites us to ponder on the Rwandan tragedy but also on the nature of photography. The reasoning behind this work is that, given that nobody steeped in to stop the 1994 genocide, it is as if nobody had seen the images of the atrocities perpetrated. Jaar’s idea is that, had we truly seen, it would have been impossible not to do something: by choosing not to show the photographs, Jaar restores their meaning, he leaves it up to the viewer to create his own image inside his head by reading the accompanying description on the boxes’ lids.

This way, the “real” image generates an endless amount of unique doubles: this characteristic of Jaar’s work seems to make a joke of the infinite technical reproducibility of photography, one that, in this case, maintains paradoxically intact the element of being unique which is typical of the artworks and returns a blaze of glory to photography and dignity to the victims.

Real Pictures is a non-presentation, an absence with is painfully present, in which images become more powerful and distressing by the very fact of not being shown. Real Pictures stands as a criticism of the media, of the ability to portray images, of our indolence as end-users of such images and of our critical potential.